One Response to Episode #54: Hominins Without Boats, Catholic Craziness and Much Ado About Conferences

Hey guys, awesome podcast. I don’t know if this is the right place to say this, but fuck it. It’s Friday. Let’s party.

I just wanted to make a small note on Papal Infallibility.

[I say “Papal” here because historically there have been many cases for various other infallibilities such as church infallibility where anything the church says is taken as true, or episcopal infallibility where anything a bishop says is taken as true. Evangelicals for instance believe that only the Bible is infallible and inerrant.]

As you’ve said the pope’s infallibility is supposed to only apply when the pope is teaching on certain aspects of doctrine. This condition is known as Ex Cathedra, literally “from the chair”. So personal opinion supposedly doesn’t count. However, it has happened historically that the pope has said things that have been claimed to occur Ex Cathedra such as when Benedict XVI addressed the US bishops in March this year he said, “[a] reasoned defence of marriage as a natural institution consisting of a specific communion of persons, essentially rooted in the complementarity of the sexes and oriented to procreation”.

In his letter as a Cardinal, Joseph Ratzinger wrote a letter Named “The Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons” which was approved by Pope John Paul II and is considered an infallible document through episcopal directions that have never been sufficiently challenged. It essencially calls homosexuality “an intrinsic moral evil;” and continues, “thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder.” The document opens with the words, “Homosexualitatis problema” or the “homosexual problem”.

On 10 January 2012 he said in Ex Cathedra from the Vatican, “Consequently, policies which undermine the family threaten human dignity and the future of humanity itself. The family unit is fundamental for the educational process and for the development both of individuals and states.”

Obviously, this is just one example of how stupid and abusive the position of Papal Infallibility is. Making statements that have been psychologically and sociologically proven to be untrue. I’ve been harping on about homosexuality a bit, sorry this is really where my religious, biblical and theological expertise comes into play – he’s said a lot of stupid things, not just about homosexuality, don’t even get me started on the paedophile priests.

But it is true what Christopher Hitchens says, “Call someone an imam, or a priest, or a reverend, there’s nothing they can’t get away with in our culture.”

However, the point I really want to make is that what you guys said was essentially true that there is a small margin in which papal infallibility should apply, but historically speaking, this authority has been abused, often against women, people in the LGBT community, the poor and why they should bother paying tithes, and the list goes on.

Basically they’re child raping frauds… and have bad taste in clothes… and hats.